Microsoft News Tracker

Reuters:

Spurred by the popularity of MySpace, News Corp. sites have overtaken Yahoo Inc. sites as the most viewed by U.S. Internet users, according to new industry data cited by News Corp. on Tuesday.

According to comScore Media Metrix data, News Corp.’s Fox Interactive unit said the total of its pages viewed by the U.S. Web audience jumped to 39.5 billion in November from 38.7 billion in October.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s total pages viewed fell to 38.1 million in November from 41.6 billion in October. Microsoft ranked third, falling to 17.9 billion in November from 19.3 billion.

Yahoo countered that it still had a larger audience, even though Fox sites won the top ranking for number of Web pages viewed. The company also has far more ads, and its customers spend more time, on average, on Yahoo than MySpace, it said.

The big story here is less MySpace growth than Yahoo decline as is admirably shown in a chart at TechCrunch. Yahoo stated that a reason for part of the decline was its increasing use of AJAX Web 2.0 style interfaces and Microsoft could likely use a similar rationale. Google won’t need it however - their page views were up 5% and of course, that’s predominantly search where their interface is rather spartan.

Update Dec. 14: The original version of the above story had millions where it meant billions. I have corrected it above.